TakeBack

Write a rule

Rules are written on the Filtering tab of the settings page. Reddit and X each have their own rule, and a site with no rule is left alone. You can type your own rule or start from one of five templates: No Politics, Positive Only, Tech Focus, No Outrage and Professional.

A rule can hide things, like “Hide celebrity gossip and drama”, or keep only certain things, like “Show only technology and programming content. Hide everything else.” Filtering also has to be switched on with the main toggle at the top of the settings page or in the toolbar popup.

What happens on the page

On Reddit, TakeBack checks posts and comments, on both the current site and old.reddit.com. On X, it checks tweets and replies. Posts on screen when the page opens are checked first, and new ones are checked as they load. Each post is sent to the model on its own, and a small indicator with your rule shows on it while it is being checked.

The model answers with “show” or “blur” and a reason of a few words. Posts it shows get a small check badge. Posts it blurs are covered with “Content Filtered” and the reason. Hovering over a blurred post lets you see through it, and clicking it removes the blur. If the model can’t be reached, the post stays visible with a warning badge.

Choose a model

The General tab has six options for the model that checks your posts:

• Ollama, running on your own computer at localhost:11434.
• LM Studio, running on your own computer at localhost:1234.
• Any other server with an OpenAI-compatible API, at a URL you enter.
• OpenAI, with your own API key.
• Groq, with your own API key.
• TakeBack Cloud, a paid subscription that needs no setup.

For Ollama, LM Studio and custom servers, you pick a model from the list the server reports. The Diagnostics tab checks a connection step by step, from whether the server is reachable to whether a test request comes back in the right format, and suggests fixes for common problems.

What leaves your browser

Where your posts go depends on the model you choose. With Ollama or LM Studio on your own computer, the text goes only to that computer. With OpenAI or Groq, the text of each post and your rule are sent from your browser to that company’s API. With TakeBack Cloud, they are sent to TakeBack’s server on Cloudflare Workers, which passes them to Groq to run the GPT-OSS 20B model.

For Reddit, what is sent is the post title and text, or the comment text. On X, it is the tweet text, with the account that retweeted it or the account being replied to where there is one. Your rules, settings and API keys are stored in Chrome’s local extension storage.

Rules about subreddits and users

Under the Reddit rule there are three switches that add more to what the model sees: the post’s score, its author and its subreddit. They are off by default. With them on, you can write rules such as “Hide posts with a negative score” or “Hide posts from r/news”.